21st-23rd Sept 2015 – Boston MA

A startup by any other name… Very limited half price tickets for Business of Software Conference from Balsamiq & Twilio

August 19, 2014

By Hermione Crease

What is a startup? Our recent conversations with BoS Alumni reminded us just how difficult it is to pin down a definition of, ‘startup’. We think Paul Graham is self interested in describing a startup as a potential billion $ business and it means far too much to other people. We also have a very special deal courtesy of Twilio and Balsamiq for a few lucky startups to attend Business of Software Conference for half price…

Is a startup, run by massively experienced serial entrepreneurs and heavily funded, the same thing as a couple of kids in a garage bootstrapping an app? Of course not. When does a startup become a grown up? With funding? With revenues? With product-market fit? With a new product line? Impossible to generalise.

We have never designed BoS to be for startup software businesses. After all, there are a lot of events for startups and BoS has tried to support the growth of more established but independent software businesses.

There is, of course, a lot of value for startups and startups also bring an immense amount of value to the BoS conversation, through their constant innovation and as a lightning rod for some of the most important topics we get to discuss. Business of Software Conference is about people who want to do the right thing, not the thing that everyone else is doing. Business of Software Conference is for independent-minded software people.

Having said that, if you take startup to mean early stage and watching the dollars every step of the way – if you’re pre-revenue and pre-funding and you’ve been in operation for less than two years, we think there can’t be much debate.